actually favoring it.  The writings of your Dews, and Baxters, and Plummers, and Postells, and Andersons, and the proceedings of your ecclesiastical bodies, abundantly show this.  Never, and the assertion is borne out by your statute books, as well as other evidences, has Southern slavery multiplied its abominations so rapidly, as within the last ten years; and never before had the Southern Church been so much engaged to defend and perpetuate these abominations.  The other of these reasons for believing that Southern slavery will never be conformed to your beau ideal of slavery, in which it is presupposed there are none but principles of righteousness, is, that on its first contact with these principles, it would “vanish into thin air,” leaving “not a wreck behind.”  In proof of this, and I need not cite any other case, it would be immediate death to Southern slavery to concede to its subjects, God’s institution of marriage; and hence it is, that its code forbids marriage.  The rights of the husband in the wife, and of the wife in the husband, and of parents in their children, would stand directly in the way of that traffic in human flesh, which is the very life-blood of slavery; and the assumptions of the master would, at every turn and corner, be met and nullified by these rights; since all his commands to the children of those servants (for now they should no longer be called slaves) would be in submission to the paramount authority of the parents[A].  And here, sir, you and I might bring our discussion to a close, by my putting the following questions to you, both of which your conscience would compel you to answer in the affirmative.

[Footnote A:  I am aware that Professor Hodge asserts, that “slavery may exist without those laws which interfere with their (the slaves) marital or parental right” Now, this is a point of immense importance in the discussion of the question, whether slavery is sinful; and I, therefore, respectfully ask him either to retract the assertion, or to prove its correctness.  Ten thousands of his fellow-citizens, to whom the assertion is utterly incredible, unite with me in this request.  If he can show, that slavery does not “interfere with marital or parental rights,” they will cease to oppose it.  Their confident belief is, that slavery and marriage, whether considered in the light of a civil contract, or a scriptural institution, are entirely incompatible with each other.]

1st.  Is not Southern slavery guilty of a most heaven-daring crime, in substituting concubinage for God’s institution of marriage?

2d.  Would not that slavery, and also every theory and modification of slavery, for which you may contend, come speedily to nought, if their subjects were allowed to marry?  Slavery, being an abuse, is incapable of reformation.  It dies, not only when you aim a fatal blow at its life principle—­its foundation doctrine of man’s right to property in man[B]—­but it dies as surely, when you prune it of its manifold incidents of pollution and irreligion.